About me and this site

Welcome to my new website!

I’m Cathy Young, a journalist who writes on a variety of topics–at the moment mostly gender issues and Russia (where I was born), but also foreign policy in general, a wide range of social and cultural issues (race relations, religion and policy, education), and arts and culture.

One of my goals in my writing is to cut through left/right stereotypes and focus on the issues from an independent perspective. My politics can be described as libertarian/conservative, leaning more libertarian on some issues and more conservative on others.

I am a strong believer in individual rights and limited government. I believe in judging people as individuals, not on the basis of membership in a group. I believe that reality trumps ideology, left or right. I believe Western democracy, flawed through it is, is worth defending. Perhaps most important, I believe that it should be possible for honest and intelligent people to disagree on political issues and respect each other.

My old website, cathyyoung.net, has been neglected for a while. I’ve been meaning to revive it but updating it at this point would be a huge hassle, especially my technical skills are not even at the “web design for dummies” level. (The site was created by a friend who is a web designer, and I can’t really ask her to work on it for free but I also don’t want to sink a lot of money into it.) I’ll still maintain the other site since it has a lot of material I’d hate to lose, but this site will be the only active one, with up-to-date links to my articles and columns and my occasional blog.